Three things:
1
Reporting by email is all well and good. However, it forces a user to reveal their email address (which the security conscious may not wish to do). Reports can and will be as biased as the issue being reported. Whilst you shouldn't shoot the messenger you should be wary of blindly trusting them too.
2
You'll now have people arguing over the "who started it" aspect of any disagreement. And should the practice of dragging issues from one discussion into another discussion continue, you'll have quite a long trail of breadcrumbs to follow to determine the origin of the issue.
3
Visibility of rules. A sticky forum post can easily be missed. Those subscribing to RSS feeds of a certain topic will not reach that topic via the forum home-page. Those clicking on topics from the site's sidebar will also not see this information.
The solution to 1
..is pretty much impossible. And going by the sheer amount of hypocrisy and manipulation I've witnessed recently, you're making a rod for your own back.
The solution to 2:
..see the solution to 1
The solution to 3
..is, at the very least, move the 4 bulletin points and statement on consequences to the HTML template that houses the box that people type into when making a forum topic or forum reply. This means anyone making any contribution to the forum cannot argue that they could not see the rules. This can be a 2 minute copy-and-paste job.
A better solution would be to have forum software that properly supports moderation and reporting. This out-of-the-box one plugs in nicely to Wordpress but does not allow for proper community management.
If you're genuine about this, please don't implement a half-hearted solution as it will get manipulated and abused. If you're going to make a change, make it right. Fixing it later is going to be much, much harder.
